TRUST WORTH Y: N E W A NGL ES ON TR UST S FRO M B E NE FI CI ARI ES A ND TR UST E ES
beneficiaries, both individually and as a sibling group. For the four of us he could have described his principles of saving, spending and investing, and how making financial mistakes can ironically promote self-confidence and competence. Doing so would have helped us to know his thoughts on how to settle conflicts with his second wife, his law partners, and among us sisters. He might have offered thoughtprovoking questions and challenges for us to consider. Third, it would have been helpful for him to suggest to us how we manage the relationships that are a part of being a trust beneficiary. Should we consider the trustee as a mentor or merely a cashier? Should we consider the money from the trust as part of our marital resources and share it with our spouse? What is it that we, his four daughters, might encounter as beneficiaries? How should we work with the trustees and what should we expect from them? How might we settle differences with them? How could we use the inherited resources to support our long-term goals rather than solving short-term crises? Sharing that information, and those perspectives, and then eliciting ours, would have given us a chance to know our father better, talk about what the future might hold without him, and help us determine our own point of view.
THE VALUE OF POSITIVE STORIES I believe that the anxiety reflected in the creation of and/or administration of trusts has to do with four basic relationship challenges that fall into four general categories: (1) The desire and determination to control or shape another’s behavior; (2) not knowing the details of another’s life experience and family history so that distance, disconnect and conflict occur; (3) behaving as though when someone disagrees with you, something is “wrong” with them rather than seeing it as a mutually created problem in the family system; and (4) the premise that cutting off and deciding “this relationship is not worth continuing” will solve the problem.
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